12.04.2013

I was psyched to hear that the story about my photo book is trending at Fast & Co.

I have no idea what that truly means in terms of actual eyeballs looking at my book. And is anyone really reading the book or are they just talking about it? I decided not to ask TED Books how many people have actually bought the book. Better not to worry about that.

11.04.2013

True, radio and photography are not two forms of communication that seem most compatible.

Still, I had an interesting interview with A Martinez, host of the NPR show Take Two in southern California. Martinez kept describing my photos and then asking me to tell the story behind it. It worked well, actually.

11.01.2013

I have to admit, I am not used to being on the other side of the mike.

Filmmaker Holly Morris interviewed me about my book last week. OK, we interviewed each other. She is making a film about the old women still living in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. TED released her TED talk at the same time as my book.

Today, I'll be describing some specific photos from my book on the NPR show Take Two, on KPCC 89.7 FM in southern California. Not sure exactly when I'll be on air, the show runs 9-11 am Pacific.

10.24.2013

It's still hard for me to believe, but in one more week
my book on Chernobyl and Fukushima will be out. It's called Would You Stay? and
it's being published by TED Books, the people who do the TED talks.

It's an e-book, which makes it feel less tangible but I
am so excited I keep waking up and wondering if it is really happening.

I first went to Chernobyl in 2007 and I've been working
on this on and off for 6 years. I never expected initially it would become such a big project but it always felt important, and after the 3.11 earthquake in Fukushima it felt doubly important.

During the next week I'll post some photos from the
opening sequence. Today just the cover...

Here's a caption:

If you arrive by train, as the nuclear personnel do, this
is your first view of the sprawling Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, across the
cooling pond. The station that once generated power now consumes it. The new
heating plant has the only active smokestack on the horizon. Beside it are the
unfinished, abandoned cooling towers. Beyond the smokestack at right is the
“Shelter Object” which covers the Fourth Block of the plant.

Even after Fukushima, Chernobyl remains the site of the
world's worst nuclear accident. The population within 30 kilometers was
permanently evacuated, including residents of Pripyat and many villages.
Although the Chernobyl plant finally stopped generating electricity in December
2000, today 3,700 employees continue to work at the plant. They commute from
their new city of Slavutych, which was built after the accident to replace
Pripyat.

6.05.2013

Except for
laundry, the outside of the Ide’s apartment block in the temporary housing
complex is colorless: gray gravel, black asphalt, beige aluminum siding. There
is just one spot of green visible between here and the treetops on a distant
hill: Mamoru Suzuki is bent over his bonsai, watering and pulling off dying
leaves. Dozens of pots cascade off his steps and along the wall as far as his
neighbor’s door. More of his plants line the far end of the building.

Compared to
his boisterous neighbors, Suzuki moves as quietly as a whisper. So shy we can
barely hear him speak, he looks like he wishes he could vanish, or shrivel up
like the brown leaf in his hand. After a few false starts, I ask about his
plants and he proudly begins to explain. He tells us how he cares for the
delicate tiny trees and shrubs, and discusses uses of the flowers and herbs.

Bit by bit
his story comes out. Like his neighbors, Suzuki was a farmer in Kawauchi. He is
wiry and must be over 70 but moves like a younger man. He owned seven cows, he
says, but he had to kill them all after the radiation came. For a time he lived
here with his family of five, but they left to move further north, to Fukushima
city. They tell him their new housing is much better up there, but he refuses
to move a second time. Why? Because of the plants. Already he’s had to give up
all his gardens once. He can’t bear to do it again. Since he could not take
these new plants with him, he chooses to live here, alone, rather than uproot.

“I have no
vision for the future,” he says. “Summer here is too hot and winter too cold.”

Across the
sea of asphalt stands another block of apartments. A man comes barefoot out of
building H-15 and sits cross-legged on his front deck. He begins shaving there,
and calls out to us as we pass by.

Yukio Kubota
is also from Kawauchi town. On March 15, 2011, four days after the earthquake,
he and his wife evacuated to Niigata, his wife’s hometown on the west coast.
She has stayed with relatives for the past year but he returned to Fukushima Prefecture
to be closer to home.

Once last
summer he returned home for a few days. The weeds were more than a meter high,
he says. “The first day we cut weeds. The second day we removed all soil in the
garden up to 5 cm deep. The radiation inside the house was 4.3 μSv per hour,
but we didn’t have a Geiger counter so we were sleeping in this place.” They
left when they learned how high the radiation still was.

A note on
radiation dose: 1 Sievert is 1000 milliSieverts (mSv) is one million
microSieverts (μSv). To compare, the peak level measured in this part of the
Exclusion Zone (330 μSv/hr on 3/15/11) (1) was 76 times higher than the dose inside
Yukio’s house; however his house level was still 12 times more than typical
background radiation. The EPA recommends an annual dose limit of 1 mSv per
year, which Yukio would reach inside his house in less than 10 days.

Symptoms of
Acute Radiation Sickness generally start above 350 mSv — 81,400 times the
hourly dose at Yukio’s. This leads some Japanese to conclude there is nothing
to worry about. However, just because you’re not keeling over today doesn’t
mean there is no risk of future disease (as I discussed here).

Now, a year
later, government workers have finally decontaminated his house and yard. The initial
new reading was 1 to 2 μSv per hour. “I am waiting to see the radiation levels
before I decide to move home,” he says.

6.04.2013

The Wakamiya evacuee housing complex in Koriyama city forms a giant grid of pre-fab buildings, 11 apartments per building, 5 buildings per row, erected on a field of gravel and asphalt. In the middle is the Odagaisama Center—a community building with a recreation room and a radio station that broadcasts news and music to evacuees.

There is riotous laughter coming
out of Block G-1, Unit 2, of the Wakamiya temporary evacuee housing complex in
Koriyama. We hear it from the far end of the
row. As we approach, a small round man and a woman come erupting out the door.
As if the force of the laughter inside ejected them from the unit. They nearly
barrel into a neighbor, and as they relate a story, he is soon laughing too. I
smile politely and, still laughing, the couple introduce themselves.

Takaaki and Yumiko Ide are
evacuees from Kawauchi village. They are farmers, and one of the first things
Takaaki tells us is how he misses the trees that surround their farm in
the mountains near Namie. “And the vegetables, the vegetables,” his wife Yumiko
breaks in. “Here we have to buy food, for the first time in our lives!” Beans,
squash, rice and eggs, all from the store!

The Ides have lived here for 14
months with their family. Initially, five of them crowded into one 10 by 20-foot
unit, but as some other evacuees have left they’ve been able to spread out. Now
their teenage daughter lives on one side, and their two mothers on the other.

I ask if we could see what their
apartment looks like and soon we’re all pulling off shoes and crowding into the
small kitchen. The mothers, two little ladies, are sitting on stools behind a
table covered with steaming dishes. A round of introductions and soon the
laughter fills the room even more than the people.

Each unit has a traditional
tatami mat bedroom, a kitchenette and bathroom. Red Cross and government donations
provided them with a refrigerator, 2-burner stove, microwave, toaster oven,
washer and even a flat screen TV. It may feel small after their farm in the
hills. But compared to third-world refugee camps (or a Tokyo apartment) it’s
downright spacious.

The family is about to eat
dinner. Takaaki Ide, suddenly finding himself host to surprise visitors, both
wants and does not want us to stay. We refuse but as we trade phone numbers we
promise to return another day.

Outside, the sun has set but the
July heat still rises off the massive mall-sized parking lot in front of the Block
G-1 apartments. Every parking space is painted neatly with a letter and number:
evacuation planners intended for each family to bring exactly one car, but in
fact most of the lot is empty.

This complex
built after the quake has 570 units, housing evacuees from Tomioka, Kawauchi
and Futuba towns. All these towns are in the original 30-km exclusion zone, but
in some places the radiation levels have fallen. Kawauchi residents have
been allowed back in.

Like many
rural villages, Kawauchi’s population has been decreasing for a long time, down
to 2,800 in 2010 from 3,800 in 1995. (1) Now about 400 of them have returned
home full-time. (2) “The radiation level is down but there is no infrastructure
and no jobs and no place to work,” one volunteer, Beverly Tajima, told me.

Most
afternoons, after the shift ends at his new job in Koriyama, Takaaki Ide drives
back home to their farm. They were not permitted to bring their dog with them
to the temporary housing, and so he returns home to feed her. After one summer,
the weeds were taking over, he says. He cleared plants beside the house but
worried about radiation in the yard and left the rest standing.

One reason
for his optimism is that he is certain they’ll be able to move home eventually,
perhaps as soon as this fall. Japanese evacuees like those from Kawauchi have
something the Ukrainians don’t: hope.

Perhaps this
is an aspect of national character—Buddhist equanimity versus Slavic pessimism.
Or is it a function of timing? After two years, the future in Fukushima remains
uncertain, but give the Japanese two decades and they may be more like the Ukrainians,
resigned to their fate.

6.03.2013

Every
evening after dinner, plumber Masayuki Nagai opens the newspaper and pores over
the radiation reports. The average daily dose for each city is monitored by
government dosimeters and printed each day in the paper alongside the weather. Nagai
tracks the changes, but at the same time, he doesn’t believe what he reads. “People
don’t trust the government numbers,” he says. “Unlike the supermarkets, which
now report exactly where each food came from.” People trust the stores labels,
he believes, because a market would lose all its customers if they ever learned
they’d been lied to. It’s harder to switch governments than supermarkets.

What
went wrong in Fukushima? (What
didn’t?!)

OK folks, let’s review what happened
in Fukushima. First there was an earthquake on an earthquake-prone island.
Which caused a tsunami to hit the same country that invented the damned word.
This then flooded a nuclear power plant that was built, as usual, beside the
water.

You didn’t see this coming?

Essentially, what we had was a failure
of imagination. No one ever imagined the tsunami could be so big, no one
imagined what a nuclear meltdown would look like. It seems inexcusable. But to
be fair, disaster planners tasked with imagining the worst are often
constrained by outside forces. In the U.S., budget
priorities are often the constraint. In Japan, authorities face a “cultural
bias against open discussion of worst-case scenarios,” especially when it looks
like the Japanese government and society are unprepared for them. (1)

The Chairman of one investigation,
NAIIC, summarizes the cultural issues well:

“What must be admitted – very
painfully – is that this was a disaster “Made in Japan.” Its fundamental causes
are to be found in the ingrained conventions of Japanese culture: our reflexive
obedience; our reluctance to question authority; our devotion to ‘sticking with
the program’; our groupism; and our insularity.” (2)

So came the hell and high water.
After the Fukushima Daiichi disaster, there were three separate major Japanese investigations
into what went wrong: reports from ICANPS, a government- appointed panel;
NAIIC, an independent investigation commissioned by the National Diet of Japan,
and RJIF, an independent think tank. (The National Diet, I should note, is not
seafood — it is the name of the Japanese Parliament). Dozens of other organizations
near and far issued their own analyses, including the TEPCO (Tokyo Electric
Power Company) report, which neatly absolved itself of any wrongdoing.

The Diet report calls the
accident a manmade disaster, pointing out failures to “develop
the most basic safety requirements” including risk assessment, preparing for
collateral damage from a tsunami and developing evacuation plans. This happened due to collusion
between government regulators and TEPCO, resulting in weak enforcement and slow
implementation of regulations.

TEPCO failed to have proper emergency
training for personnel or adequate equipment inspections. In the emergency
response, the roles between the Prime Minister, the nuclear regulators and the
power company were unclear: all gave conflicting instructions and mistrusted
each other.

Here’s how bad it got inside the plant: as radiation levels
soared, workers were trying to vent the reactors, getting contradictory orders
and working by flashlight in the pitch dark. They discovered that their manuals
assumed there would be no blackout during such an emergency and that “sections
in the diagrams of the severe accident instruction manual were missing.” (3)
It’s a miracle things did not get worse.

Meanwhile, in nearby villages, an orderly evacuation was
underway. And pigs can fly.

No, actually, the evacuations were complete chaos. The
Japanese government was slow to relay information to local officials and slower
to admit how severe the disaster was. As a result, instructions for residents conflicted
and changed every few hours. Residents were told to shelter-in-place or that
evacuation was mandatory or that it was voluntary, and the evacuation zone kept
changing, from 2 km to 3 km to 10 km to 20 km from the nuclear plant. As a
result, some people had to re-evacuate four times while others were relocated
to sites with higher radiation and left there.

Approximately 146,500 people were evacuated but evacuees
were seldom informed about radiation risks or safety precautions or what to
bring with them. For the first four days, no one even knew the radiation levels
in the surrounding villages. 23 out of 24 fixed radiation monitoring posts were
washed away or disconnected by the tsunami. And the one functioning mobile
monitor was not mobile: the truck was out of gas.

Two years later, Fukushima evacuees and residents are still under
strain. Several reports condemn the government’s continuing lack of support for
public health and welfare. Again, the Diet report:

“The residents in the affected area are still struggling
from the effects of the accident. They continue to face grave concerns,
including the health effects of radiation exposure, displacement, the
dissolution of families, disruption of their lives and lifestyles and the
contamination of vast areas of the environment. There is no foreseeable end to
the decontamination and restoration activities that are essential for
rebuilding communities… The government has not seriously undertaken programs to
help people understand the situation well enough to make their own behavioral
judgments.” (3)

What I saw is that many evacuees are living in a state of
limbo, still living in temporary housing, waiting to learn if they’ll be able
to return home, waiting for more answers that never seem to come.

6.02.2013

In the months after the 1986 accident, machinery driven by liquidators often became too radioactive to continue using. So they just dug pits and buried their own radioactive vehicles.

Today, workers unearth the machinery to lay foundations for new construction. This day’s discovery was the boom of a crane. They lay it on a flatbed truck (covered with plastic to hopefully contain some of the contamination) and haul it to an edge of the Chernobyl plant site for pressure washing. (The contaminated washwater gets piped to the liquid radioactive waste treatment facility). Then the boom gets trucked to a dumpsite in the Exclusion Zone, where it will be stored until after you and I are dead. Unless priorities change once the danger fades from some bureaucrat’s mind. Or unless it gets stolen first and sold for scrap.

The horse is out? Quick, close the door! It seems to me there must be a better way, but our attention is short and disaster mitigation is long.

The immediate, tragic cost of
poor disaster preparation is obvious. Less apparent but pricier still are the long-term
recovery costs. Chernobyl has cost Ukraine 180 billion dollars over the decades,
Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych said this spring. The amount is “comparable
to the annual gross domestic product of our country,” he pointed out. (1)

With poor advance preparation, quick
solutions during the disaster response stage often cause their own problems. Consider
in Chernobyl:

After the Chernobyl accident,
with no prior plan for disposing of radioactive waste, much debris beside the
plant was simply dumped back into the ruins of the reactor 4 building. The “Shelter” (AKA the Sarcophagus) with outer concrete walls and iron shellwas then built over the destroyed reactor 4.
Constructed hastily with little planning in extreme conditions, it is neither
stable nor leak-proof. It was meant to last 20 years but started crumbling
sooner. As a result, a modern radiation enclosure is now under construction. It
will cost $2 billion to build, an expense borne by 40 countries and the
EBRD (European Bank for Reconstruction and Development).

From 2008 to 2012, workers did groundwork
for this New Safe Confinement super-structure. And guess what they found
underground? Contaminated bulldozers. Excavators. Dump trucks. All buried in
the field just west of the destroyed reactor.

Elsewhere in the Zone,
liquidators buried everything from topsoil to village houses. Now at least 800
burial sites, mostly unmarked, are slowly leaching radiation into the
groundwater. (3) (Fukushima now faces similar problems, which I’ll discuss later).

Other decisions made in Chernobyl’s heat
of the moment — exactly where to evacuate, and how to structure survivor
benefits — have become politically and economically intractable problems for
Ukraine. Once these plans are set they are hard to revoke. Ukraine spends 5 to
7% of it’s annual budget on Chernobyl survivors (2) but at the same time, the stipends each individual
receives are so small as to be unhelpful. “Every month, the government buys me
one bottle of vodka,” one liquidator told me.

I’ve heard people ponder how
life in Ukraine would be different had the disaster never occurred. But
accidents happen. The seas rise. An equally valuable question: what if the
disaster happened but it was really well managed?

6.01.2013

Fumiya
Sekine, age 6, and his mom Kaori Sekine play with his new pets — a pair of stag
beetles. The Sekine family evacuated from their home in Kawauchi village, 20
miles west of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, due to high radiation
levels in the village. They have lived in a one-room “temporary housing center”
apartment in Koriyama city since the complex opened in June 2011. They have no
idea how long they’ll stay here.

Disaster
Management 101

Got a crisis on your hands? Maybe
your roof is leaking after a heavy snow. Maybe there’s a mile-wide tornado roaring towards your town. Or maybe, like Kaori Sekine and her
family, your village is suddenly radioactive.

Whatever your crisis, experts in
disaster management speak about four stages of managing it. These are: (1)
mitigation, (2) preparation, (3) response and (4) recovery. Mitigation is all
about reducing risk — anticipating the worst that can happen and figuring out
what we can do to make it merely bad. The preparation stage involves emergency
planning and practice, so that everyone is ready when the disaster hits.
Response, well, I’m not going to break that down for you: it’s putting your
emergency plan into action. And recovery is the long slow road back to normal —
or finding a new norm if your old life is forever gone.

Mitigation, preparation,
response and recovery. In other words, by the time you see the tornado coming,
the experts are already on to stage 3. The rest of us are two steps behind
them. Maybe you meant to repair the roof last fall but never got to it. Maybe
you wanted to dig tornado shelters but got stymied by red clay and red tape in a red state. Sorry about that, Oklahoma. When you’re
standing in the nuclear plant control room with wet feet, it’s too late to
build a higher seawall.

The fact is, preparing well for
every possible disaster is expensive. Who wants to spend their hard-earned cash
building a 50 foot seawall if 19 feet has always been sufficient? Who wants to
spend money on a new roof if you can just patch the old one? Until, in
hindsight, it seems completely necessary and stupid to not have done it right.

There’s always a balance between
our assessment of risk and the cost of preparation. The lack of political will
to prepare fully means we just wait for a calamity to strike. Then, once the
children are dead but before they are buried, our priorities suddenly shift.

Our pattern of responding to
disasters is so consistent that it’s completely predictable. By next year, I expect,
more schools in Oklahoma will have tornado shelters and schools in Connecticut
will have door code security. For a few years, the Boston Marathon will have
more police protection and factories in Dhaka will have better enforcement of
building codes. Every district in Fukushima Prefecture is now having emergency
drills. If disaster strikes a second time we’ll be more prepared. But then, if
nothing goes wrong for a decade, we’ll let things slide again.

If you went to an American
public school between 1960 and 1990, chances are it had a fallout shelter. You
may remember the sign, probably posted by the back door where the smokers hung
out. But I bet you were never down there. Built during the Cold War, these
basements were equipped to protect schoolkids from those Russian missiles that
never came.

If we had a Fukushima in the
U.S. today, we’d find most of those fallout shelters unusable. The one
in my high school, I heard, got filled with jazz band instruments and art
supplies. In Moore and Sandy Hook and Far Rockaway and Boston and even in
Fukushima, the recovery will peter out and then so will the preparations for
next time. Some will still carry wounds but the rest of us will forget.

4.26.2013

Ilya Danilov told me, "People think we living near Chernobyl are monsters," and he made this face to show his point. "We are not monsters, we are people!"

Today is the 27th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster. Ilya Danilov was 18 when I took this photo. He's grown up in this post-Chernobyl land, living in Slavutych with his dad who works at the Chernobyl plant.

Last I talked to Ilya, he was trying to figure out a way to get out of Slavutych.

My thoughts today are with all my friends from Chernobyl. Another year passes — may the next year be better for you than this one!

3.19.2013

Fumiya
Sekine, age 6, and his mom Kaori Sekine play with his new pets — a pair of stag
beetles. The Sekine family was evacuated from their home in Kawauchi village,
20 miles west of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, due to high
radiation levels in the village after the3.11 earthquake and nuclear plant meltdown. They have lived in a
one-room “temporary housing center” apartment in Koriyama city since the
complex opened in June 2011.

Today I
intended to write about disaster management, but life is unpredictable. A
combination of client deadlines, a snow day and having my son Jacob home sick
left me no time to write.

Next came the flu and the end of the semester. Come back in June and
you’ll find more to read.

3.18.2013

Thanks to all who entered my
Chernobyl quiz on Saturday. Jake DeWoskin, who I last saw in high school,
wins the prize for submitting the first 100% correct answers:

True or False:

1.
After the Chernobyl accident, soldiers shot dogs to prevent them from spreading
radiation.

TRUE. Igor
Kostin, the first photojournalist at Chernobyl after the accident, said this:
“Our first priority was to save the people. As for the land and the animals, we
contented ourselves with simple, drastic solutions. The gun for the dogs and
cats, the shovel and the bulldozer for the land. These were our only weapons to
fight radioactivity.”

2.
After the Chernobyl accident, conscripts removed radioactive debris using
nothing more than shovels and wheelbarrows.

TRUE.
For liquidators, the most dangerous jobs involved tunneling under the
melted reactor and cleaning the adjacent rooftop of reactor 3. With nothing but
shovels and wheelbarrows, thousands of men removed chunks of nuclear fuel and
graphite exploded from the reactor core. Radiation was so extreme that shifts
were limited to one to two minutes.

3. Thieves have stolen
radioactive radiators from the Chernobyl zone to sell for scrap metal.

TRUE.
My friend Sasha Sirota, who runs the evacuee organization Pripyat.com,
knew that radiators were being stolen from Pripyat and they finally caught it
on video here. How did the thieves get in? The only possible way is by
bribing the Zone security.

4. Last month, a section of roof
at the Chernobyl plant collapsed due to heavy snow.

TRUE.
This happened Feb. 12, 2013. Read the Ukrainian government report here.
Though the collapse was apparently not dangerous, it hints at the general
deterioration of the Chernobyl plant.

All TRUE. All these crazy things did in fact happen in Chernobyl. And believe me you, this list is only the tip of the iceberg.

3.17.2013

Pastor Nobumasa
Tajima argues with his daughter Christine about whether it was unsafe after the
Fukushima Daiichi disaster to let her children play in the grass beside the
church. Nobumasa Tajima, a Japanese-American, runs the Koriyama Baptist Church
with his wife Beverly.

What is safe?

It’s not hard to learn the
current radiation levels across Fukushima Prefecture. You can hear them on the
evening news, along with the weather, or read yesterday’s totals in the local
paper. Outside many public buildings there are dosimeters showing current readings. (1)

What is harder to grasp is the
meaning of all these numbers. In the past two years, the Japanese public has
had a (new) crash course in radiation. The first question for many was Am I safe here?—can I breathe, eat, fish,
swim, plant a garden, let my kids play outside? Unfortunately, there are
only two honest answers to such questions: (1) Maybe, and (2) We don’t know.

Acute Radiation Sickness (caused
by a high exposure in a short period) has a well-defined set of symptoms. However,
for low-level exposure to radiation over a long period, it remains impossible
to predict how any individual will be affected. Will some radioactive particle
you ingested trigger cancer or not? It is all a question of probabilities, and
there are too many variables and too little research to know.

One school of thought, the linear
no-threshold (LNT) model, argues that there is no safe level of exposure—your risk
is directly proportional to your dose. A competing view, the threshold model often
used in toxicology, argues that minute exposures to radiation are harmless. In
this view, the important question is determining what the safe threshold is. A
third perspective, the radiation hormesis model, argues that radiation at very
small doses is actually beneficial because it triggers cellular repairs.

In Fukushima, with no conclusive
data available, residents are stuck deciding if the risk from radiation, in
their personal assessment, is large enough to outweigh the definite costs of
moving, such as loss of home, community and employment. Just as in Chernobyl, people
under 35 are more likely to leave and say they will not return (2). Once you
decide it’s not safe here, the next question is: where is safe?

Recently, as reported here, (3) there has been social
pressure to assume that radiation levels in Fukushima are safe everywhere
outside the Exclusion Zone, and to not ask too many questions. A consensus message
that “all is well” will help the province economically, public officials have
argued. Such optimism quiets protest but I have to assume it assuages few
fears.